One of the more interesting crime dramas currently on either side of the Atlantic started with a concept that was only about three decades old.

Called “Scott & Bailey,” it’s a police procedural about two female crime-solvers. Or, in the words of Suranne Jones, who stars in the series and came up with the original idea with her fellow actress Sally Lindsay, it’s “a Manchester-based ‘Cagney & Lacey.’ ”

Set in that British city’s decaying landscape, “Scott & Bailey” views every dead body or sullen perp through the eyes of the detective constables Rachel Bailey (Ms. Jones) and Janet Scott (Lesley Sharp, who stepped into the role when Ms. Lindsay, who occasionally shows up as Bailey’s sister, became pregnant with twins).

Yet it’s not hard to spot the pages that have been torn from the “Cagney & Lacey” handbook: Both dramas have tough-minded, emotionally complicated odd couples at their center, female cops who are different in temperament but who share a deep understanding of each other’s lives and who endlessly hash things out in stolen ladies’ room moments. Cagney (Sharon Gless) was single and more glamorous than her partner, Lacey (Tyne Daly), the wife of a contractor. Bailey is an unmarried woman in her 30s who binge-drinks and has impulse-control issues; her partner is a levelheaded 40-something mother of two.

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Sally Wanwright

But the earlier show, which began in 1981, had been off the air for 23 years when Ms. Jones and Ms. Lindsay hatched their idea over a bottle of wine. Both were facing that strange age netherworld that most actresses are consigned to in their 30s and 40s: “the wife-of, sidekick-to, mother-of, mistress-to” marginal parts, as Ms. Jones put it. So the two sketched starring roles with heft for themselves.

Sally Wainwright, who created “Scott & Bailey” with Diane Taylor, a former homicide detective, fleshed out their idea for the British network ITV in ways that make it feel modern. More often than not, the cases assigned to the Syndicate 9 homicide unit involve crimes affecting women — a serial rapist on a murder spree, the strangling of a pregnant teenage bride, an actress in X-rated films who kills her husband — or are told from a woman’s point of view.

And in place of the barking white male in charge of seemingly every squad room in television, the team reports to a by-the-books detective chief inspector named Gill Murray (Amelia Bullmore). There have been other members of Gill Murray’s club: “Law & Order” had Lt. Anita Van Buren (S. Epatha Merkerson) at the top, and Chief Superintendent Jean Innocent (Rebecca Front) calls the shots on the British procedural “Inspector Lewis,” a spinoff of “Inspector Morse.” But what makes Murray — loosely inspired by Ms. Taylor — a dynamics-changer is that her authority is absolute: No male or female officer is keen on being called into her office.

When Ms. Wainwright first started working on “Scott & Bailey” she knew she wanted to create a universe a step beyond the woman-against-the-boys’-club construct that undergirded previous shows like “Prime Suspect” (starring Helen Mirren) or “The Closer” (starring Kyra Sedgwick). The idea was to dramatize a situation, she said, in which it was “perfectly acceptable to be a woman and high-powered in an interesting job and it goes uncommented upon because you’re surrounded by women who are doing a similar caliber of job.”

Reviewers in Britain applauded. “Who knew that letting your female leads behave as Actual Women when confronted with hideous crimes and disastrous relationships could prove so watchable?” The Guardian said of the series, which it called “genuinely gripping.”

But there was grumbling that with such a female perspective (Ms. Wainwright and Ms. Taylor write the scripts, and Nicola Shindler is executive producer), the males came off as buffoonish.

“At home, at work, they’re either evil sexist pigs and homophobes, or dull brainless snoring twits,” The Guardian complained of the male portrayals, adding, “Couldn’t there be just one reasonable male character?”

“I kind of resent that,” Ms. Wainwright said, arguing that the criticism sprang from the fact that viewers are more accustomed to cop dramas that revolve around gun-brandishing, chokehold-happy guys with big personalities. “I don’t think the men on our show are weak. I think the point is that we’re not concentrating on the men; we’re concentrating on the women.”

Though “Scott & Bailey” was the highest-rated new drama on British TV in its first season, in 2011, it isn’t widely available in the United States. It has reached a handful of PBS stations, but the easiest way to watch it is via the Web site of KPBS, the San Diego affiliate, which is streaming episodes after they appear on the air.

Ms. Wainwright hopes that as viewers become more immersed in the series (it rewards those who start from the beginning), they will forget which sex is in charge and accept it as a great detective drama.

“I find it surprising when people say, ‘Oh, ‘Scott & Bailey’ is all about women,’ ” said Ms. Wainwright. “Is that supposed to be a new thing in 2013?”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR26 of the New York edition with the headline: A ‘Cagney & Lacey’ With Constables. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe